Um, akshually, there would still be lots of burning things for heat and livestock. Livestock are the majority of all mammals on earth, outnumbering humans by a lot, only 6% of mammals are wild animals. In addition, lack of preserved food would lead to higher consumption.
BUT it being so unsustainable and full of disease would mean it would rapidly decrease populations, which would decrease ecological impact after a couple of generations, so it’s a sound strategy longterm.
My father claims the simple life on a homestead is way closer to nature and pollutes less than living in a city.
He cuts his wood with a chainsaw that’s using a mixture of gas and oil. This gas and oil certainly doesn’t come from the trees. Its imported. But it’s apparently the traditional way.
Then in winter he burns the wood to heat the house and it creates a circle of soot in the white snow all around it. But it’s all natural. On certain days, when you go outside around his house, you can taste the wood burning in the air. All natural!
If we all go back to owning our plot of land and exploit it like settlers, surely this is going to be good for the environment.
Tell him the NEW homestead way is better. Solar panels, lifepo4 batteries, electric chainsaw, heatpump primary wood burn auxiliary if you live somewhere it gets well below freezing.
Before anyone says anything solar still works on a cloudy day it just makes less, that’s why you size your array to make what you need when it’s cloudy not when it’s sunny. Summer can just have an over abundance of power nothing wrong with that
I’m trying and doing experiments. I have a cabin off grid on their land and it’s mostly solar, but I do need to burn wood during winter even if I don’t really like it. He has a sugar shack on another corner of the land and he’s also using solar, except the stoves and boiler. I bought him an inverter and he prefers this to the noisy generator.
However he pretty much hates everything else with batteries. My mother has an electric golf cart and he whines every time the lead acid batteries need maintenance or need to be changed (because of lack of maintenance). I could swap them for lifepo4 batteries, but they’re still going to lose capacity over time and we’re getting to the same point of “but I don’t have to put a $1000 worth of batteries in my tractor every few years”! Same “issue” with an electric ATV for the kids. He hates it because it needs to be charged and the lifepo4 battery had to be changed once. But apparently the cost of gas and diesel doesn’t register.
But yeah. So far at the latitude we’re at, solar power input and consumption varies a lot depending on the seasons. The solar setup is fine for the sugar shack because it’s used during the day in the spring, when there’s no leaves. But in the cabin, it’s been more complicated. I’m not there year-round and it works well in summer, but in winter the lifepo4 batteries need to be heated for hours if not days before I can charge them via solar, and get acceptable performance. It’s a work in progress.
I can highly recommend These batteries for home level power i have 6 of them and they make my offgrid life possible. Rated for 6000 deep discharges (or 16 years of literally daily deep discharge) they have a standard charge range of 5°C to 70°C naturally if you are in a cold latitude an even mildly insulted shed would be ideal to justify stay above that 5c mark.
If your sun is limited especially in winter consider giving east/west vertical panel orientation a shot. And that same site with the batteries has great deals on palettes of solar panels if you just need more in general.
If you aren’t already using 48V for inverters make the switch, much more efficient and long term cheaper. Put your panels into as large of a series string as your inverter will allow before parallel. Higher voltage incurs less resistance losses and it can be a pretty significant loss. Had an inverter die on me and had to drop to an older inverter while waiting for the replacement. It didn’t support the higher voltage as the newer one so had to drop from 320v to 80v ( from one string of 8 to pairs of 2 in parallel) ended up losing almost a full 1kW of peak potential
Thanks for the tips. I’m kind of stuck with the choices I’ve made in the past and I don’t want to upgrade or change before it’s really needed, in order to prevent waste. One is just a cabin where I go maybe a dozen times a year. The other is a sugar shack used in the day for only a few weeks during the spring so it just has a 3000W 24V inverter. It’s enough for the lights and the water pump once in a while. We really don’t need that much power for now but I’ll certainly switch to 48v when we’ll need to upgrade.
As for the ideal temperature, I’ve pretty much given up. The average temps in January are around -10°C and it sometimes goes in the -20°C. I thought about multiple ways to insulate and heat the batteries but in the end, I don’t want to leave this unattended in the middle of a forest. So far my solution in winter for the cabin is to carry a portable power station that was sitting in a heated place.
Lifepo4 is pretty much the one type you can safely leave unattended, it’s very very hard to get them to burn and even when they do it’s mostly smoke. Lithium is the big flame/boom one. The trade off is less energy density compared with lithium but for home storage thats less of an issue. The batteries i shared even feature fire suppression systems (basically an automatically deployed fire ratardant foam internally) for additional protection.
Building a little box of insulation around the batteries using some foam board panels and a water heater blanket with some water pipe heating tape you can get at most hardware stores would be the cheap easy way and should help with the colder month temps. And is easily picked uo and set aside in warmer weather
Forget the chainsaw. Just burning the wood like we did in the past creates smog over a whole region. Wood burning is banned in my city and I can literally smell it when I go to the next city where it’s allowed.
Where I live winters are brutal and most people switched to electric heating over time. If everyone would go back to wood burning, we’d have really bad air quality and smog in winter, even in the countryside and over small villages.
Well, a hand saw was also needed. But you are correct that a chainsaw wouldn’t be needed unless you’re taking about a water sawmill, which is similar in processing wood, but has no carbon footprint in that stage of wood production and usage.
What warms your house in the winter?
Where is dirtier snow? In your fathers homestead or in the city?
Where is more generaly more particless in the air? In the countryside or in the city.
Wood is better than coal or oil, but worse than nuclear or renevables.
In Germany the countryside often is way worse. Especially in the winter. All of those super old, shitty wood furnaces pumping out fine particles often create a worse environment than on new year’s eve. Farmers shredding their crops, pesticides everywhere, polluted ground water from all the fertilizers, etc.
The 100k Population town I used to live in is way cleaner than the shit I have to deal with just a mere 5km outside of that town.
Electricity, like the vast majority of people here. About 94% of which is hydroelectricity. Other ways to heat buildings are slowly getting banned anyway.
Where is dirtier snow? In your fathers homestead or in the city?
What? The snow is dirty where there are particles in the air that ends up on the ground. It’s not a contest of city vs countryside. If you live in a place that snows and walk around a house that is heated by wood burning, you will see black particles and specks in the snow surrounding the house. It’s the same at my cabin. When I get there the snow outside is impeccable… until I light the wood stove inside, and then it slowly turns grey all around the cabin. It doesn’t matter if the snow in a city is even dirtier.
Where is more generaly more particless in the air? In the countryside or in the city.
Funny thing, in winter during smog episodes, the air quality can be worse in the countryside because of people burning wood. Anyway, it’s banned in bigger cities because of how horrible this is in dense population centers. So, ironically, the air is more polluted when I go to my parents’ place in the countryside where they are burning wood to heat their house, than around my apartment in the downtown of a major city. Again, sometimes the air quality is worse in the countryside or in suburbs during winter, in large parts because of wood burning.
Where in the world you live if 94% of energy comes from hydroelectricity? It has to be Norway that is pretty unique country in both culture and landscape. I dont think there is any other country where that is possible.
And i can admit that in Norway my points fall flat.
I dare to say that in the most of the world air quality is worse in the cities than in the countryside. Also i dare to say most of the time even where you live air quality is worse in the cities.
I dont really understand your point with the sut on the snow? If you live in the city the snow is grey and nasty meaning there is more pollution? Does that not mean there is less pollution in the countryside? Im mean per person there might be more in the rural areas, but i dont really think your lungs care.
Cant find any credible source that says Canada produces even near to that percentage of electricity with hydro.
I tought we were talking pollution as a whole.
Btw. Im little intrested now why your cabin producess so much sut? What fire wood you use as a fire wood in canada? What kind ovens you use? Is the chimneys straight pipes or what?
In 2021, Quebec generated almost all of its electricity from renewables including hydro (94%), wind (5%), biomass (0.6%) and solar (<0.1%), showing just how much of a renewable powerhouse the province is. Today, its utility operator, Hydro-Quebec, is the largest in Canada, playing an integral role in power exports to U.S. states like New York, New England, and Maine.
Quebec’s continued leadership in providing renewable electricity to North American customers is something we can all be proud of.
Aktshually, there’s a few municipalities with their own power companies. I knew about Hydro Sherbrooke but TIL there’s also Hydro Magog, Hydro Coaticook and Hydro Joliette.
Im mean per person there might be more in the rural areas, but i dont really think your lungs care.
I really don’t think it’s possible to transplant every city’s population into low-density countryside locations. Without the majority of people dying, anyway.
Um, akshually, there would still be lots of burning things for heat and livestock. Livestock are the majority of all mammals on earth, outnumbering humans by a lot, only 6% of mammals are wild animals. In addition, lack of preserved food would lead to higher consumption.
BUT it being so unsustainable and full of disease would mean it would rapidly decrease populations, which would decrease ecological impact after a couple of generations, so it’s a sound strategy longterm.
My father claims the simple life on a homestead is way closer to nature and pollutes less than living in a city.
He cuts his wood with a chainsaw that’s using a mixture of gas and oil. This gas and oil certainly doesn’t come from the trees. Its imported. But it’s apparently the traditional way.
Then in winter he burns the wood to heat the house and it creates a circle of soot in the white snow all around it. But it’s all natural. On certain days, when you go outside around his house, you can taste the wood burning in the air. All natural!
If we all go back to owning our plot of land and exploit it like settlers, surely this is going to be good for the environment.
Tell him the NEW homestead way is better. Solar panels, lifepo4 batteries, electric chainsaw, heatpump primary wood burn auxiliary if you live somewhere it gets well below freezing.
Before anyone says anything solar still works on a cloudy day it just makes less, that’s why you size your array to make what you need when it’s cloudy not when it’s sunny. Summer can just have an over abundance of power nothing wrong with that
I’m trying and doing experiments. I have a cabin off grid on their land and it’s mostly solar, but I do need to burn wood during winter even if I don’t really like it. He has a sugar shack on another corner of the land and he’s also using solar, except the stoves and boiler. I bought him an inverter and he prefers this to the noisy generator.
However he pretty much hates everything else with batteries. My mother has an electric golf cart and he whines every time the lead acid batteries need maintenance or need to be changed (because of lack of maintenance). I could swap them for lifepo4 batteries, but they’re still going to lose capacity over time and we’re getting to the same point of “but I don’t have to put a $1000 worth of batteries in my tractor every few years”! Same “issue” with an electric ATV for the kids. He hates it because it needs to be charged and the lifepo4 battery had to be changed once. But apparently the cost of gas and diesel doesn’t register.
But yeah. So far at the latitude we’re at, solar power input and consumption varies a lot depending on the seasons. The solar setup is fine for the sugar shack because it’s used during the day in the spring, when there’s no leaves. But in the cabin, it’s been more complicated. I’m not there year-round and it works well in summer, but in winter the lifepo4 batteries need to be heated for hours if not days before I can charge them via solar, and get acceptable performance. It’s a work in progress.
I can highly recommend These batteries for home level power i have 6 of them and they make my offgrid life possible. Rated for 6000 deep discharges (or 16 years of literally daily deep discharge) they have a standard charge range of 5°C to 70°C naturally if you are in a cold latitude an even mildly insulted shed would be ideal to justify stay above that 5c mark.
If your sun is limited especially in winter consider giving east/west vertical panel orientation a shot. And that same site with the batteries has great deals on palettes of solar panels if you just need more in general.
If you aren’t already using 48V for inverters make the switch, much more efficient and long term cheaper. Put your panels into as large of a series string as your inverter will allow before parallel. Higher voltage incurs less resistance losses and it can be a pretty significant loss. Had an inverter die on me and had to drop to an older inverter while waiting for the replacement. It didn’t support the higher voltage as the newer one so had to drop from 320v to 80v ( from one string of 8 to pairs of 2 in parallel) ended up losing almost a full 1kW of peak potential
Thanks for the tips. I’m kind of stuck with the choices I’ve made in the past and I don’t want to upgrade or change before it’s really needed, in order to prevent waste. One is just a cabin where I go maybe a dozen times a year. The other is a sugar shack used in the day for only a few weeks during the spring so it just has a 3000W 24V inverter. It’s enough for the lights and the water pump once in a while. We really don’t need that much power for now but I’ll certainly switch to 48v when we’ll need to upgrade.
As for the ideal temperature, I’ve pretty much given up. The average temps in January are around -10°C and it sometimes goes in the -20°C. I thought about multiple ways to insulate and heat the batteries but in the end, I don’t want to leave this unattended in the middle of a forest. So far my solution in winter for the cabin is to carry a portable power station that was sitting in a heated place.
Lifepo4 is pretty much the one type you can safely leave unattended, it’s very very hard to get them to burn and even when they do it’s mostly smoke. Lithium is the big flame/boom one. The trade off is less energy density compared with lithium but for home storage thats less of an issue. The batteries i shared even feature fire suppression systems (basically an automatically deployed fire ratardant foam internally) for additional protection.
Building a little box of insulation around the batteries using some foam board panels and a water heater blanket with some water pipe heating tape you can get at most hardware stores would be the cheap easy way and should help with the colder month temps. And is easily picked uo and set aside in warmer weather
This is where he’ll lose interest.
Natural and Traditional is an axe, not a chainsaw.
Forget the chainsaw. Just burning the wood like we did in the past creates smog over a whole region. Wood burning is banned in my city and I can literally smell it when I go to the next city where it’s allowed.
Where I live winters are brutal and most people switched to electric heating over time. If everyone would go back to wood burning, we’d have really bad air quality and smog in winter, even in the countryside and over small villages.
Well, a hand saw was also needed. But you are correct that a chainsaw wouldn’t be needed unless you’re taking about a water sawmill, which is similar in processing wood, but has no carbon footprint in that stage of wood production and usage.
Yes and no. Chainsaw is really marginal polluter.
What warms your house in the winter? Where is dirtier snow? In your fathers homestead or in the city? Where is more generaly more particless in the air? In the countryside or in the city.
Wood is better than coal or oil, but worse than nuclear or renevables.
In Germany the countryside often is way worse. Especially in the winter. All of those super old, shitty wood furnaces pumping out fine particles often create a worse environment than on new year’s eve. Farmers shredding their crops, pesticides everywhere, polluted ground water from all the fertilizers, etc.
The 100k Population town I used to live in is way cleaner than the shit I have to deal with just a mere 5km outside of that town.
Electricity, like the vast majority of people here. About 94% of which is hydroelectricity. Other ways to heat buildings are slowly getting banned anyway.
What? The snow is dirty where there are particles in the air that ends up on the ground. It’s not a contest of city vs countryside. If you live in a place that snows and walk around a house that is heated by wood burning, you will see black particles and specks in the snow surrounding the house. It’s the same at my cabin. When I get there the snow outside is impeccable… until I light the wood stove inside, and then it slowly turns grey all around the cabin. It doesn’t matter if the snow in a city is even dirtier.
Funny thing, in winter during smog episodes, the air quality can be worse in the countryside because of people burning wood. Anyway, it’s banned in bigger cities because of how horrible this is in dense population centers. So, ironically, the air is more polluted when I go to my parents’ place in the countryside where they are burning wood to heat their house, than around my apartment in the downtown of a major city. Again, sometimes the air quality is worse in the countryside or in suburbs during winter, in large parts because of wood burning.
Where in the world you live if 94% of energy comes from hydroelectricity? It has to be Norway that is pretty unique country in both culture and landscape. I dont think there is any other country where that is possible.
And i can admit that in Norway my points fall flat.
I dare to say that in the most of the world air quality is worse in the cities than in the countryside. Also i dare to say most of the time even where you live air quality is worse in the cities.
I dont really understand your point with the sut on the snow? If you live in the city the snow is grey and nasty meaning there is more pollution? Does that not mean there is less pollution in the countryside? Im mean per person there might be more in the rural areas, but i dont really think your lungs care.
Guess again.
https://www.canada.ca/en/services/environment/weather/climatechange/climate-plan/clean-electricity/overview-quebec/_jcr_content/par/mwsadaptiveimage/image.img.jpg/1736367657671.jpg
And the whole point is about the pollution created by wood burning, not if cities are more polluted in the first place!
Cant find any credible source that says Canada produces even near to that percentage of electricity with hydro.
I tought we were talking pollution as a whole.
Btw. Im little intrested now why your cabin producess so much sut? What fire wood you use as a fire wood in canada? What kind ovens you use? Is the chimneys straight pipes or what?
The numbers are for Québec only.
He is referring Québec, our main (only?) power supplier is even called Hydro-Québec, but they also do wind and solar power.
Aktshually, there’s a few municipalities with their own power companies. I knew about Hydro Sherbrooke but TIL there’s also Hydro Magog, Hydro Coaticook and Hydro Joliette.
I heat primarily with wood and no you don’t get gray fucking snow around the house. This person is exaggerating for effect.
I really don’t think it’s possible to transplant every city’s population into low-density countryside locations. Without the majority of people dying, anyway.